Grammy nominee shakes off jitters

Hunter Hayes really couldn't have wanted much more from his "Super Bowl."

Tony Sauro

Hunter Hayes really couldn't have wanted much more from his "Super Bowl."

"It was unbelievable," said the country music singer-songwriter. "It was my first Grammys. Going in, I was a nervous wreck. I've done enough performing, but this was a whole other thing.

"People said, 'Just relax.' There's no relaxing or chilling out. This is my Super Bowl. It was epic. It was cool."

Hayes, 21, was one of the youngest performers during the Grammy Awards telecast on Feb. 10. Nominated in three categories, he performed "Wanted," the best-selling country song of 2012 - alone at his piano - and then introduced Carrie Underwood, who won two Grammys.

They re-unite Tuesday when Hayes opens for Underwood at Stockton Arena. "Blown Away," a Grammy winner as best country song and performance, is the name of her tour.

"I didn't look out," Hayes said of the famous faces in front of him. "I couldn't. It would freak me out."

Hayes didn't win anything, though his self-titled debut album was nominated. He's got plenty of time.

"It's kind of counter-intuitive," Hayes said from a tour stop in Billings, Mont. "But I was on my piano, playing my song. It's just a mini-zone. I knew I had control of the song. Control of the tempo. Changing the key. Part of my nerves were going crazy. But it was just me and my song."

"I never expected it," he said. "You don't expect it. It's come to me, like in a dream, since middle school. Just one dream coming true after another."

His fantasizing began when the Breaux Bridge, La., native - an only child - was given an accordion for his second birthday. By 4, he was playing in a band and performed "Jambalaya" with Hank Williams Jr. At 6, he was acting in a movie ("The Apostle") alongside Robert Duvall, who gave Hayes his first guitar.

By the time he was 10, Hayes had recorded two albums on his own, "surrounded by positive energy all the time" from parents Lynette, a school teacher, and Leo, an "expert on anything and everything."

As a "quiet" teenager - "I was really shy"- growing up in Lafayette, La., he built a "little" home studio.

"I spent so much time there, I neglected going out or hanging out," Hayes has said. "I skipped all the parties. I skipped the prom every year because it always fell on a date when I had a gig to play."

He graduated from high school a year early, preferring to pursue his passion: "I told them 'I'm not going to college. I'm gonna be a songwriter.' I made a deal with myself."

That included completing "one song a week for the rest of the year," he said. "The week I graduated, I wrote a song every day."

Hayes' pragmatic family was "non-musical," he said. So his parents "learned a business they knew nothing about." That included making the 20-hour round-trip drive from Lafayette to Nashville, Tenn., once a month for four years.

"I never just wake up and a light bulb goes on," Hayes said. "That doesn't exist in my family. We think about it for a long time. Then, we think about it some more. Mom and dad kept me in school until the weekends. I lived my dream. Slowly but surely, it was the right thing to do."

During those years, he recorded two more of his own albums, including one that formed the template for "Hunter Hayes," his 2012 major-label debut on which he sings all the vocals and plays all 30 instruments.

His four-piece band's 40-minute performance precedes Underwood.

"She's great," Hayes said of the million-selling singer-songwriter from Muskogee, Okla. "Last year went really well and we've gotten off to a great start."

Hayes also likes to get off the ground. He's training to fly single-engine airplanes.

"There's just something about the cockpit of a plane," he said. "It's very technical. I love specific ways of doing things. I get away from music for a couple of hours."

He's not flying right into a second album, though.

"I've been working on something, but I'm not ready to talk about it," Hayes said. "I've been in the studio experimenting. It's not just 'new-record time' for me. It represents another chapter in my book."

There are plenty more to write: "Oh, my gosh. "I have a whole list of things I haven't even come close t doing. All I know is that everything is a gift. You have to treat it like that because it always can disappear."